This essay will revisit a theme very much on the minds of AI boosters and critics alike: what this technology in its many and varied forms could actually help to solve. Embedded in the approach is the assumption that at the moment, it's not solving the right things or solving them well enough. I think we can all agree to that premise, yes?
Looking at my ideas, I realize it's not really an essay but a list. I'll try to make it readable. Structurally I'll introduce a more light-hearted idea, then a more serious or provocative one. As I speak into the void, and void if you're listening pay attention, let's all keep in mind that we live in a time of magic. We constantly use technology and have no idea how it works. What is magic, if not blissful ignorance of science?
Teleportation
A lot of my best ideas for what AI could really improve deal with the physical transfer of material. Enough of this digital data distribution...I've had enough of immateriality. It's too easy to look at and say things now; the world has gotten noisier and worse for it. People want to get away. Teleportation is the answer. What I mean by teleportation is the literal moving of a body from one to another spot. I don't care how it's done. Like the dead hero of the mediocre would say: "It just works!"
Effective teleportation would create fascinating problems with traffic. People would probably end up inside one another. What a nightmare! Is it worse than driving cars? I'm not sure; I'd have to see it first. I spent my childhood in cars and I don't wish to discuss it. Teleporting inside someone else - or inside a piece of concrete - would add something to this world: a problem. But you see, it would be a problem we'd never faced before as a species, and humans get quite creative when that happens.
Procedurally generated work
Teleportation might seem provocative enough for some, but I consider it light hearted because I don't think it'll ever happen, so we can say whatever we like about it.
Scarier is the plausible creation of procedurally-generated work. I'm familiar with this term through video games that use complex mathematics to continually generated virtual play spaces that are functionally limitless in their arrangements. I wouldn't say it makes for particularly interesting games. You end up with gameplay focused on player choice and imagination rather than designer decision and clever limitations on player agency that force what scholars might call "emotion". In producing basically limitless worlds, game devs of procedurally-generated games have effectively drained games of artistic direction. It doesn't really matter what the buildings or characters look like; the point is they are endless.
If AI comes and eats up everyone's jobs, or turns everyone into middle managers running a stable of AI agents from dawn to dusk (and beyond), then we're going to have a very real problem of large portions of the workforce not interested or not able to chat with bots having no paying jobs.
If AI productivity so supercharges economic gains that we can afford to pay everyone a decent salary without them having jobs (i.e., the Star Trek outcome), we'll still have the problem John Maynard Keynes identified in the 1920s: people kind of like labor. A job well done gives a day shape, meaning, definition. I sit here writing nonsense in part because it's a form of labor I enjoy.
Procedurally-generated jobs could simulate an entire workflow with goals, deadlines, specifications, feedback, and outcomes that could keep huge masses of the underemployed working at forms of labor they find satisfying. Sounds weird, until you flip it around and look at how many video games have become jobs. I'm just holding the stick from the other end and shaking it: if games can become jobs...
Waiting in Line / Traffic
If Toyotism or "just-in-time" production can be effectively universalized, and everything we do feels like an Amazon purchase in its speed, efficiency, and invisibilization of cost, then why are we still waiting in lines like cave people?
Sooner or later musicians will offer AI generated versions of themselves to play private concerts for fans in their homes, on their phones. This will eliminate some lines. Home cinemas and streaming video have taken a big bite out of lines at theatres - excellent.
But this is just displacement: moving people out of public spheres and keeping them in private ones. This won't work for government functions, weddings, funerals, or driving to work (if we still have to do that). I don't know what I'm asking the magic AI box to do in this case. But when I hear something 'works like magic' and I still have stupid problems like my feet hurt and people smell and I'm stuck in a line for four hours, I want to make a wish on the friendly little lamp.
Distribute offices across cities more logically. Self-drive cars into automated kiosks that do the paperwork. Authority, authenticity, and liability limit many official functions to in-person, officially stamped and recognized functions. The USA is working hard at disintegrating many of these functions. I say, keep going: AI is going to burn down a hell of a lot of what people call society. Why are we only burning down the good things, like art and employment? Can't we burn down long lines?
Speech-to-code (building on TTS, dictating software)
"Computer, make me a perfect movie"
This is basically my point in one sentence. I don't need to keep writing, but I want to (something an AI bot could never feel - the desire to write). Text to speech was an epiphany for a lot of people, though mostly I see it on live streaming sites used by viewers to annoy content creators. Dictating software, or speech to text, is pretty phenomenal; I've used it to transcribe quite a lot.
Take the same logic and give me speech-to-code. Let me tell the magic box precisely what I want to see, without using my hands or sitting up straight, and then let the code flow. Functionally this already exists. One can arrange software just so to make it happen, though it requires quite a bit of work and has a lot of friction. One must review the code, after all.
I'm almost certain this will happen soon, and it'll be an uneven, bizarre, unsettling mess.
Cleaning hard to reach spaces
This is another one of my finicky physical qualms. Well, not mine alone. At times the hype around AI talks about moving mountains when a lot of people just want their couch moved for like five minutes, just to get the dust out.
Maybe all apartments could come equipped with vacuums installed in the corners, and an AI could, I don't know, suck the whole house when dirt builds up. Maybe houses in general were designed by generation after generation of idiots who didn't know what it meant to clean them (they had servants, women, or slaves to clean them, maybe?). Whatever the issue is, most houses are wildly unresponsive to the constant problem of dust. Can AI fix this? Be real with me.
Shrinking me to fit me in airplane seats
Okay, another light-hearted one and that's two in a row; I'm sorry. But while we're talking about the manipulation of time, space, and material, let's talking about shrinking me to fit on airplane seats. This one is juicy and powerfully felt by me, and I know you've thought of something like this, too. If you haven't thought about it, next time you're on a plane (or bus or train), have a look around for a small child. They may be bored, but see how much more space they have? Imagine you could be that size, just for the time it takes to travel.
Imagine too the hilarity of watching people board a plane and, one-by-one, shrink down to 2/3 or 1/2 their size. Imagine if they got stuck that way. Imagine if they sat on each other! Once again, a new hilarious problem would introduce itself to humanity. Would airlines simply shrink their seats to pack in more customers? Probably - the bastards. But then people could just shrink down even more. Or they could size up and smash the seats. So many chaotic, beautiful outcomes.
Moving power plug outlets up
Oh no, a third light-hearted one! This really is leftovers from my gripe about dust in corners. It's a far easier fix, by the way: power outlets are hidden in rooms like it was some secret we use electricity. Why am I crawling and twisting my shoulders trying to unplug my 13th unnecessary device? Put the power plug higher up on the wall and closer to the door. I don't care if it's ugly; houses in general are pretty ugly. Figure out how to make it nice and aesthetic. Or maybe it's time we all stop pretending we live in smooth-walled, sunny rooms with no scuffs, marks, or inconsistencies. Why are we making our homes look like catalogue homes? Those homes are fake! How often and in how many areas of life must we pursue the false?
A serious idea: if people won't listen to me (expected), maybe they'll listen to the magic AI box? If we could get the logics and eco ethics right on AI bots, maybe they could convince people to stop living like it was an imagined version of 30 years ago ("retro", "vintage", "heritage", "traditional") and start using interior design to fix physical rather than emotional problems.
Identifying inefficiencies in executive pay decisions
On the topic of replacing human expertise or "wisdom" with the "objective" empirical thinking of AI, let's have the bots take a good hard look at the economic wisdom of overpaying executives. Let's put human greed in front of the cold hard light of eco-ethics, empiricism, the scientific method of measuring input-output equilibrium. How much money could be saved if CEOs took what they earned instead of what they extracted?
Bigger idea lurking here of course: is capitalism as practiced in certain places the most efficient system? Does the market solve more problems than it causes? Does it distribute wealth efficiently. Is it really 'free'?
We'd have all kinds of nightmares with this approach. The eerie mysteries of machine learning aside, the ideas we hold dear are rarely what we practice in real life. That is to say, a country like the USA is neither fully democratic nor free market capitalist. It is a hodge-podge of human solutions to human problems: injustice, greed, geography, prejudices. The system we "have" is more like a head cold than cancer. It is fluid, and based on fluid dynamics. Things change and shift, since human ideas and preferences change and shift. It's entirely possible an AI could understand this and account for it, but it would be producing machine solutions to human problems. We'd have to move to meet the machine at least as much as we forced it to move to meet us. It would propose solutions, in other words, that would feel not inhuman but "un-human", based on logics we don't perceive or value, in pursuit of outcomes we couldn't see or desire.
The machine would have its own fluid dynamics - it's learning cycles and feedback death loops - and it could put society on a hilarious path of hyper pay for executives, firing entire companies except executives, or executing executives. The machine going mad is a trope in sci-fi for a reason: in trying to reflect humanity's very biological, chaotic, and ecological patterns, logic statements make themselves go mad. This may be one of the limitations AI models eventually "solve". Machine brains built on principles found in nature could be the answer - synthetic brains and all that.
Whatever happens, humanity's same old problems will jump in the mix. Our solutions and bonded to our problems. Both of them make us the species that we are. New tech PR teams have internalized their own marketing campaigns, and really believe they are changing the world. Don't change the world; understand it. We could redistribute wealth along the cold logics of AI to increase efficiency, true. Probably all the visible faces of tech leadership today would be back in the metaphorical mailrooms of their companies. Or, they'd be hyper-wealthy if AI determined that what our culture really values is not efficiency, but affect; not solutions, but sales. AI could be a very scary magic mirror indeed.
Resurrecting the 'ether'
Around the time of the discovery and harnessing of electricity, there were really fun theories about an 'ether' that existed between all material things, like air but it could conduct electricity and perhaps other invisible elements. To be honest, I forget much of what I read of this, but I reckon the concept was considered independently in so many cultures at so many different times that it's at least comprehensible to anyone who ever wondered, as a kid, what smells 'look like' and why far away sounds travel slower than closer ones.
It's possible any era of disruptive tech and economic ideas throws humans back on the same old assurances: good/bad dad gods, romantic traditionalist story-telling, populist rumblings. Bring back the concept of the 'ether' - invisible energy between all living things. It seems to me one of the more benign or ambivalent types of religious imaginations, unable to be easily weaponized or
Creating a Las Vegas-like stock market for the rich to torture themselves with
These exist but they're not nearly popular enough and too often linked to real world economics. Look, the rich need a playground and they need to lose a lot of money so that they can feel something again. Unfortunately, like kids jumping the fence at the playground, the rich often trickle down into the real world and confuse it for their perpetual semester-at-sea lifestyles. It's not their fault; extreme wealth likely causes significant mental health issues, a topic well worth its own obnoxious essay. But we do need some kind of contingency for this 'trickle down economics' that so damages the economy. Don't ask me where I got that term; it just came to me magically.
Perhaps AI could produce large-scale simulated stock markets for the rich to pour their intangible wealth into, and they could watch as the game takes their money up and down, up and down. Strapped into VR suits, the rich could then play out a virtual tour of poorer neighborhoods, throwing money to virtual beggars, or attending virtual philanthropy fundraisers and compete with one another to tell less-racist jokes over virtual cocktails.
The production of the play space is not the innovation. Obviously the rich have many play spaces already and more are on the way. Las Vegas everywhere means losers everywhere, and that is the general direction for the USA's culture. What I'm getting at is that the play spaces need an AI nanny to put the fences up a little higher. "Build that wall" - another phrase that, see, just came to me. Most of the walls in the world are made to keep poor people away from what are typically shared resources: jobs, land, water. This is very inefficient and the market economy ought to be ashamed of itself.
But there are good walls keeping angry dogs in, white collar criminals away from the economy, and perverse people away from children. Letting the greedy decide where the walls are is a step towards market inefficiency. The rich, put simply, don't know when to stop. Like gambling addicts, their habits wreak havoc on the real economy when they come figuratively or literally drunk looking for more of the household budget to spend on the only thrills that make them feel alive. We've really, really got to look out the mentally ill hyper wealthy. It's hard to convince people to be walled in, unless you've got a really good video game in there. I say: Virtual Vegas has to happen. Keep the rich away from the economy at all costs (pun intended?)
Ending Cruise Lines
Ending with a light-hearted suggestion: perhaps the floating feces malls we call cruise ships are not the best entertainment device for the 21st century. As we AI slop and sludge our way towards climate crisis and collapse, I'd like to suggest we drop some leave some 20th century luxuries behind. Personal jets are on the list; designer dogs probably should go just for aesthetic and public health and safety reasons. Sorry, yappy pappies. Not sure if AI can replace a pet yet, but there are some robot dogs out there.
Leave behind the 20th century. That's what it's all about. We're in the 2020s. In the 1920s, had the world yet left behind the 1800s? Not really. There were some definitive wars around that time that had their roots in the 1800s. Electricity also hit people in the head like AI is hitting us now, shifting all kinds of ideas about jobs and labor. Being the ultimate technology that we are, humanity adapted after killing a lot of itself and performing sloppy plastic surgery on its class and race systems (almost unrecognizable!)
Count me in with the guilty groups still trying to live in the 20th century (specifically the 1990s). My human mind already feels like it's falling apart and I've only just crawled into middle age. Sometimes getting with the modern times means pretending to forget that all these 'new' problems and solutions arrived, hit us in the head, and left already. Sometimes embracing the new means forgetting history. It's a sad, sorry aspect of human nature. We have to be amnesiac so we can imagine what we're doing now is progress, as opposed to what dead people did before being "good for the time but misguided".
Imagine if we didn't have collective amnesia, though! We'd remember every single Great Man of History was actually one of many smart people meeting the right moment; we'd remember every single war only solved a few petty individual problems (how inefficient war is! To benefit a few already-rich at the great expense of entire nations of the innocent and unknowing).
That concludes this bizarre little list of things I think AI could really improve (as opposed to what it's sold as improving). I went off on some tangents, beg your pardon for that. Next time I'll use an AI to, uh, fix that?